CIA Divided opinions on Tenet's legacy

Many in Congress think the CIA director failed in his mission.
COMBINED DISPATCHES
WASHINGTON -- "I feel it coming," George Tenet told a national security aide just months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to that aide's recollection. "This is going to be the big one."
The CIA director called that fearful and, as it turned out, accurate expectation his "sixth sense." When he steps down next month, he may be remembered as the man who had the right intuition about the assault on America but not the telling detail.
He suspected who -- Al-Qaida. When? Soon. Where and how? That eluded him and the rest of the national security apparatus.
Tenet announced Thursday that he would resign the post he has held for seven years.
Tenet submitted his letter of resignation to President Bush, who said he had accepted it reluctantly.
Tenet's departure was welcomed by Democrats in Congress who have been increasingly critical of his leadership, Republicans who saw him as a potential political liability for Bush and members of both parties who believed his resignation was necessary to make way for urgent reforms in the intelligence community.
Mixed views
Tenet's departure leaves Washington divided on the question of whether he was a scapegoat or flawed sentinel in the Sept. 11 attacks and beyond. By insider accounts, he spoke up early and often about Al-Qaida's intention to kill Americans in a big way.
Yet the independent panel investigating the Sept. 11 attacks harshly criticized the CIA for not doing more to foresee and stop them.
Later, when Bush was building his case for war against Iraq, Tenet assured him he had "slam dunk" evidence showing Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, Bob Woodward wrote in his new book. It was a leading justification for the invasion. Such weapons have not been found.
The convulsive times of the CIA director's tenure and the intense scrutiny of U.S. intelligence made him more of a public figure than Americans are used to seeing in their spymaster.
Outlined mission of CIA
The son of Greek immigrants, Tenet rose from No. 2 in the agency to become chief in 1997, a Democrat nominated by President Clinton. He quickly declared that the post-Cold War CIA knew just what it had to do. "We are no longer in search of a mission," he said. "We know what the mission is. We know what the targets are."
They were, among others, terrorists, weapons runners and drug traffickers, not the usual suspects in U.S. clandestine operations.
His mission was tested before long. A year into his job, the CIA and Albanian authorities thwarted an attempt to bomb the U.S. Embassy in Tirana. A month later came the successful attacks on the embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, killing over 200 people. Tenet quickly pinned Al-Qaida as the culprits.
Former national security aide Richard Clarke, who recounted Tenet's "sixth-sense" prediction to him in his book faulting the Bush administration for taking Al-Qaida too lightly, says the CIA chief spared no effort to convey the gravity of the threat.
But to some lawmakers, Tenet is inescapably tied to failures.
Democratic Sen. Bob Graham of Florida, former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, challenged Bush's assertion that Tenet did a "superb job."
The CIA chief's tenure "has been marred by the intelligence lapses prior to 9/11 and the flawed information about weapons of mass destruction upon which the Iraq war was predicated," he said.